Telecom Lead Asia: Huawei is leading the broadband CPE market in 2012.
ZTE is in the #2 position based on revenue market share.
Both vendors benefitted significantly from the FTTH rollouts at China Telecom and China Unicom, according to Infonetics.
ARRIS maintains the top revenue share spot in the DOCSIS 3.0 CPE segment, based on strong EMTA shipments to N. American operators; Motorola, Cisco and Netgear follow.
Infonetics says despite broadband CPE revenue declining 3 percent sequentially in Q4, 2012 was a standout year for broadband CPE devices, with revenue increasing 13 percent, to $7.7 billion.
The strongest growth came from the cable CPE segment, where revenue grew 26 percent year-over-year.
In a February 27 report, Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research, said: “Cable operators worldwide have a number of bandwidth-hungry applications on tap that will drive CMTS and edge QAM channel growth throughout the year, including DOCSIS 3.0, multiscreen services via the deployment of new video gateways, and carrier WiFi services.”
Cable operators are gaining significant traction with DOCSIS 3.0 in North America, Europe, Korea, and Japan, and they’re in the early stages of rolling out video gateways that combine DOCSIS CPE with video transcoding capabilities.
DSL CPE shipments were down 4 percent in 2012, though on the bright side, VDSL CPE shipments jumped 39 percent, reaching 29 million units
FTTH CPE segment is expected to see vendor market share shifts in 2013, hinging largely on shipments in China.
Worldwide, there were 57 million FTTH subscribers in 2012, while cable broadband subscribers totaled 111 million.
Broadband CPE in 2012 benefited from a combination of ongoing technology shifts and the need to support legacy broadband services and subscribers.
In 2012, nearly half of all DSL units sold were WiFi enabled. This will swell to 74 percent by 2017. The growth of WiFi-enabled CPE reflects that service providers are moving to more integrated devices to control the user experience in the home.
Despite the difficult road for DSL, VDSL remains a real bright spot, expanding among operators in Western Europe, North America and Latin America. Vectoring solutions and a long-term path to G.Fast are driving sustained interest in VDSL2.
